


A Softer Jedha

by magikfanfic



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: A Softer World Prompts, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Backstory, Established Relationship, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Mutual Pining, Pre-Rogue One, Self-Esteem Issues, Tags will be updated as needed, Tumblr Prompt, mentions of sexual situations, mostly fluff right now but we will get the angst, probably not canon compliant
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-06
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2018-11-09 17:39:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 23,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11109558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magikfanfic/pseuds/magikfanfic
Summary: A collection of drabbles based on "A Softer World" prompts. All originally posted on my Tumblr. These are in the order that I have written them rather than in the order of the prompts. Also the stories are not inter-connected unless specified.





	1. 29. I hate it when you leave but I love to look at your butt while you walk away. (it gives me sexual arousal.)

**Author's Note:**

> The full list of prompts is [here](http://sarkastically.tumblr.com/tagged/bait-the-fic-writer-nevermind-all-the-wips) on my Tumblr.

Chirrut can be found praying more often than not, his lips moving, soft murmurs finding their way into the air as he goes through his mantras, as he dips his hands into the pearly, swirling waters of the Force, lets the rivers of feeling wash over him, feels them drip from his fingers. This is nothing new as Chirrut has always played the game of slipping from life when he needs a moment, of descending into the always too close press of the Force, of meditation, of prayer when something is bothering him or when he does not understand the intrinsic patterns and eddies of life around them. Belonging to both worlds, keenly aware of them, footfalls landing here or there or neither, somewhere in-between, it puts him off balance sometimes. Chirrut holds conversations with people who are not there. His eyes rove empty space as though he sees something in the beyond that is much more beautiful than anything that exists on Jedha. Cursed and blessed and singular they call him. Our almost Jedi they call him, though nothing could be further than the truth.

Chirrut knows that he is no Jedi, could never be.

One thing in particular that drives that fact home for him is the overwhelming, almost consuming urge he feels to always be in the presence of Baze Malbus. It is not that they spend an inappropriate amount of time together–they have separate chores and tasks and classes because he and Baze might be of a level when it comes to sparring but Baze has eclipsed him on some of the lore and history lessons while Chirrut has moved past Baze in crystal and Force work–but occasionally it feels like they spend their time together in ways that might be deemed inappropriate. While sparring, Chirrut’s grip will linger for seconds too long, and Baze will allow it, breath hitching in his throat in a way that is not just because of the physical exertion. During quiet times their hands will settle, as naturally as though they were meant to be that way, over each other, through each other, fingers tangled and caught and held instinctively.

While they each have their own cell, they are with each other most every night, huddled close against the winds that never stop blowing, that can find their way into the temple through whatever means possible. The cold of the night has sent Chirrut to slithering into Baze’s bed since they were children and these days they can barely sleep without the press of the other. In the mornings they are just a heap of limbs, practically indistinguishable save for the variation in color and size. Sometimes, sleep drunk, barely out of dreams, Chirrut will press his mouth against whatever part of Baze’s skin he can reach, and drink the moans and pants and heavy breathing he is rewarded with like thick, honey laden tea. It’s only in the quiet hours of the morning when he can risk being this bold, when they are both at that point where it is possible to feign sleep, when errant touches can be blamed on dreams and not being fully aware of the body’s reactions. They never talk about it. Even though sometimes Baze’s mouth returns the caresses against Chirrut’s skin, tongue hot and heavy against his throat, fingers sneaking quickly to ghost brush across his thigh so near to the throbbing pulse of him that it takes all of Chirrut’s control not to cant his hips into that touch, not to let the game drop to the ground and wrap his hands around Baze’s neck, pull him close, kiss him fully, press him onto his back and climb astride him, straddle him the way that he does when he wins a sparring match except in softness this time, in aching yearning need, to push their bodies together, to arch hard flesh into more hard flesh and finally discover some kind of fulfillment.

Daydreams. Nightmares. Chirrut is never sure what to call them, but it takes every ounce of willpower he possess to keep them under strict reigns. This is just another test of the Force. This is just another trial for him to pass, but it feels cruel just as much as it feels like something he would rather fail. Give me Baze, he thinks on those mornings with the other man’s lips against his chest, give me Baze, and I will give up all other gifts you have offered.

Then the day will start fully, the bells will ring, they will wake and pretend that nothing has passed, that their lips are not full and dark, that neither of them felt the press of erections, that hands did not linger, that they did not weave in and out of one another’s dreams like threads in a tapestry. Baze will be grumpy and petulant, Chirrut will spring out of bed light and airy, hands pulling at his companion. The day will begin again in earnest, and in the light nothing is sordid, nothing is passably inappropriate, nothing is the hot knife point of desire in his groin that seems to expand until it threatens to explode.

Except when it is because that feeling always rises, usually at the most inopportune times, like while he watches Baze spar with the other initiates, all thick muscle packed solidly on a body that refuses to wane despite the training, that just grows bigger and broader across, shoulders and back and core and thighs dense and full, covered with a layer of fat for protection that Baze grumbles about in the small self-deprecating way he complains about everything that is part and parcel of himself. Baze will never love himself as fully as Chirrut loves him, and this hurts in a way that Chirrut does not quite understand. Though Chirrut tries to show him and tell him, especially during the foggy morning time minutes when he can sometimes whisper things out that make Baze’s body shudder around him, how he is lovely and well-made and divine, how he is beautiful, how he is something that makes Chirrut’s blood rush through his veins singing more want than he ever imagined could exist in the entire universe, bright and hot and hard as the kyber crystals they mine and clean and work. Chirrut can launch a thousand ships of praise through the waters that are Baze Malbus, but they will all sink, settle to the bottom of his stormy sea to be forgotten, never reach land, never make a settlement, never grow. It is okay. He has more ships to launch. He has an endless supply of ships to launch. Maybe they would do more good if he could set them to sail always, never pausing, never having to pull on the temple face, the temple facade, the close friends instead of the whatever it is this is spiraling into, the whatever it is that he worries, despite the morning reciprocation, that only he feels, that only he needs.

So he prays, though he cannot say whether he is praying for it to go away or for it to blossom, a wildfire, a lightning strike, an avalanche, a natural disaster that will rush across them both and change the landscape of their relationship inevitably and permanently. Natural disasters are destructive, though, and he does not wish to lose it all. He just wants…

He just **wants**. And prays. And waits.

It is hard. It is terribly difficult. Especially when, stripped down to nothing but his initiate pants, which are loose on most of them but cling to all the round, deceptively soft looking but rock underneath parts of Baze, body damp with sweat, Baze turns to leave the training ground, and Chirrut’s eyes are drawn, inexorably like it is a magnet, like it has its own gravity, like it has cast a spell on him that he can never escape, to the perfection of Baze’s ass, which his fingers have lingered on during those morning moments of perfection, finding the crest of it but not giving in to the temptation of actually squeezing it. Chirrut watches him walk away, eyelids heavy, willing his breath not to come in pants, willing his body not to respond when all he wants to do is close the distance, kiss him, touch him, claim him, never let him leave his side or his sight because Chirrut hates their separation, hates the paths they walk that are not together, though he has to admit that he enjoys the moment in which Baze actually takes his leave only because of the view it grants him of his backside, perfectly sculpted, perfectly round. Then the roll of wanton desire through his belly, through his loins will send him hurtling downward, dropping into lotus position right there on the far side of the training room, praying until it loosens, praying until it is only a warm press at the back of his mind rather than a painfully obvious desire of the body.

This is a test, this is a trial. Chirrut is not sure if there is a way to win or lose.


	2. 31. I love the way your face lights up when someone says, “It might be dangerous.” (I am glad we are friends.)

“I just want to forewarn you that it could be dangerous,” the master says, hands spread out in front of him in a gesture that is half concern and half apology, and makes Baze think that he does not know who he is talking to at all.

Because the moment the word “danger” passes his lips, Chirrut, who had been gazing off into the middle distance in imitation of actively listening while actually drifting, weaving, wavering on the crests and swells of the Force as usual, springs suddenly back to reality. His eyes snap, his back straightens, and there is the very loud sound of him cracking all of his knuckles and toes seemingly at once in preparation for a fight that has not yet begun, an ordeal that has not even poked its head up to be seen and may never do so. Although the odds are likely that it will now mostly because if there is not some actual, palpable danger that arises during their journey, Chirrut will create one. Now that he has heard the word danger. After all there is nothing that Chirrut wants that he does not find a way to get. Baze himself feels like a tantamount example of this fact, though he is not complaining, has never complained, not once, not really, about the slow, sucking pull of Chirrut’s gravity, falling little by little into it only to find that there is no way to escape even if he wanted to, which he cannot imagine will ever happen. No, he will be land bound on the plains and valleys of Chirrut’s planet for eternity, for as long as they live and beyond that, when they disappear and coalesce and reconnect in the Force, become part of everything, become an even greater part of each other.

Although he does have some hope that the day of their Force connection will not be today or anytime soon. Baze wants a great many things even if he never speaks of them save in the darkness when they are curled together, Chirrut’s elbows poking him, Chirrut’s knees inevitably somewhere uncomfortable, Chirrut’s very bones and hard edges a cage that makes him difficult for Baze to hold not just because they are sharp but also because the man rarely settles unless he is meditating, squirms and shifts and just moves constantly such that Baze sometimes has to lock him in his grip and half the time even that turns into wrestling because Chirrut does not like to lose at sparring. (“Sleeping is not sparring. Be still,” Baze has muttered out, voice full of irritation and almost despair in the same instant as Chirrut pins him and then arranges himself on top of him like a pet.) Once he settles, when he does settle eventually after what feels like hours to Baze who is perpetually sleep deprived not just because of Chirrut’s restlessness but also because of his engine mind, which spins and churns and processes everything seventeen times before it lets them go or never lets them go at all, just files things away for later and cycles through the next worry or problem instead–there are always things to worry about, there are always worst case scenarios to find and plot and beat–but once that all finally slows to something like a lull, Baze has words for other things. The things he does not admit to in the harsh light of the cool Jedhan sun, the small selfish things he knows he should not want, and they slip out of him, one after another, like rice through fingers even in a hand tightly closed.

“I want to see snow. I want to see snow on your eyelashes. I want to kiss you while snow falls crisp around us. I imagine it is crisp like the chunks of ice that are sometimes in the marketplace only not so alarming.”

“I want to get that tea from Beka’s stall, the one that smells like jasmine.”

“I want to see you happy forever, for always.”

“I want them to give me permission to build that gun I have been designing. I think it would be an asset to the temple to branch out from lightbows.”

“I want this to last forever. This moment. This feeling.”

And Chirrut will listen in silence for once, still and quiet, head or hand or whole body pressed against Baze’s chest while he talks, while he rumbles and sends his lists of desires into the night, clearing his head of them. Small things, large things, things that will never be, all the selfishness that he is not supposed to covet released to the air, to the night, to be blown by the winds into the sands where they can be scrubbed clean and new again, where they can be chastised. Baze suffers for the wants because he is supposed to be better than that; it is low to carry them in his heart. It weighs his heart down, he feels, it is a burden on his soul and makes him lesser in the Force.

“I want to be better.”

There Chirrut will hush him. Chirrut, who never thinks any of his wants are base, who never thinks any of his desires are selfish, but then Chirrut embraces every experience in the world with arms open. Chirrut wants everything, and this never lessens him. Baze falters to explain the reasons behind his contradictory thinking when Chirrut challenges him, bold, voice sharp at the edges because Chirrut never likes hearing Baze flagellate himself. “Why am I allowed to want?”

He has no answer. Not really. There are no words, there is no way of understanding or explaining. “Everything you want enlightens you.”

“Me wanting red silk enlightens me?” The scoff in his tone is clear, the raised eyebrows, the downturned mouth, the hard set of his spine, the way that ire rises easily in Chirrut. All emotions rise easily in Chirrut, come to a peak, crash down and then his sea is calm again.

All of Baze’s emotions glitter in the depths, and he never knows whether they will be light and lovely or sharp enough to cut until he drags them out. It is better to leave them where they lie. It is safer to ignore. “Chirrut. Please. Sleep.”

“I want you to know that you can want things. It is not going to debase you. You want me, does that debase you?” The swirling eddies, the hint of lightning hidden in a dark cloud, rumbling over the sands.

“Never.” Baze does not say why because the answer is no real answer at all. The answer is that it is Chirrut, the exception to all rules, a man beyond normal understanding, a man who seems very much unlike anyone else, kyber made flesh perhaps, the Force made flesh perhaps.

Chirrut will just make the noise, the deep down one that exists in the world inside his flesh, in the caverns and caves of his body, and settle even heavier over Baze’s body, as though the physicality of him can convince Baze when his words cannot. Or at least soothe him into sleep, into rest, which it does.

Baze would deny himself everything–save Chirrut–and deny Chirrut nothing at all. Even danger, which Chirrut chases like a child after a ball when it rolls away from them, paying no mind to any of the pratfalls that might arise on the way.

The master says danger, means it as a warning, an indication for them to be careful, to be wary. Danger, he says, like a sign, bright, to place in the front of their minds. Danger, he says, and Chirrut hears only birdsong while Baze hears klaxons blaring.

“I’ll bring my lightbow,” Baze says, simply, and Chirrut turns to him, beaming, smile stretched so wide Baze can count his teeth. There is no face lovelier in the entire universe, there is no expression so dear to him as this one even when he knows that trouble is just a step away. It might mean a lifetime of worry and elbows in the side and huffed sighing and arguments when he says something little about himself, makes himself smaller in his own mind, but their friendship, relationship, love also means moments likes this when joy blazes across Chirrut’s face, and Baze just wants to kiss him, see if that swell of emotion might pass from Chirrut’s saliva into his mouth, into his blood, into his own heart, a buoy for all those shimmery feelings he feels trepidation about reaching out to grasp, fearful of sharp edges.


	3. 07. I know your weakness.  It’s kisses.  You are doomed. (Don’t worry.  We’re all doomed eventually.)

“I know your weakness,” Chirrut breathes, face pressed into his hair, lips so close to his ear that they flutter against his skin as they move, only slightly chapped from the cold Jedha nights, only slightly bruised and full from earlier ministrations when Baze nipped at them, sucked them into his mouth while Chirrut moaned.

You, Baze thinks but says nothing, only makes a low noise that results in Chirrut pressing a hand to his chest, as enraptured as someone else might be with the movement of the ground beneath their feet. He does not say it though, does not admit to that aloud even here in their room where they are safe and warm, pressed and tangled together such that, when it is quiet–a thing that Chirrut rarely is even when sleeping–he can hear the beat of their hearts in tandem, listen as their breaths rise and fall together, syncing without a trace of effort after so many years of meditating knee to knee, forehead to forehead, each of them grounding the other so that Chirrut could focus and Baze could relax. If he did say it aloud, Chirrut would tsk and cluck, make that strange collection of almost bird noises he possesses that means he is irritated, that means he cannot even imagine why the other would convince himself of such a ridiculous thing before launching into a fifteen minute lecture about how he can take care of himself, a lecture that may or may not result in an impromptu sparring session in which Chirrut will overtake him and land him bodily on the cold, hard ground at least twenty times, something that Baze is not partial to at the moment, not when he is warm and relaxed and naked and curled perfectly up in Chirrut’s embrace. No, he will save it, leave it for some other time.

A nip to his neck, though, indicates that Chirrut is looking for a game of some sort, an answer of some sort, verbal acknowledgement of the fact that he has spoken rather than deep world rumbles and breathing and too many thoughts filling the inside of Baze’s head such that sometimes he fears they will escape from his ears and his eyes and his nose since they cannot find an escape through his mouth. He does not care that this is not exactly how the body works because it still feels like it could happen. Not everything is as it seems, the Force teaches. The world is full of mysteries that we can never know, the Force teaches. We are all bound up together, the Force teaches, and that last one is his favorite. We are all bound up together, he thinks, but I am especially bound to Chirrut. And whether that is because of the Force or fate or destiny or just the foolish trick of luck and love, he does not know, does not care, will take it no matter where its beginnings were because it is the best thing in the world.

Another nip turns into sucking pressure that will leave a mark he will need to hide beneath layers of fabric, and Baze moans before he shifts a little, clears his throat so that when the words come out they will not be ravaged and thick. “Perhaps I have no weakness,” he lies, a small lie, hopefully easily forgiven by the Force.

Chirrut chuckles and shifts, moving his head from being buried against Baze’s neck, in his hair, which Chirrut loves to burrow into because he says it is soft against his cheek, a waterfall, a curtain, a veil, and smells always like incense and sandalwood and whatever chores Baze has been doing that day, whether it be baking or washing or tending the garden, to situate his chin on Baze’s chest so that he can look at him properly and though his sharp chin juts into him, Baze does not protest. How can he? Chirrut is lovely everywhere, but Baze adores his eyes, the way they ripple and gleam and dance, the lights in them, how his mirth and his tempestuous spirit are bound up in them. He flickers and glimmers there, always bright, always full of wonder, and Baze wonders if those specks in the dark, the glass reflecting light even when the only light source in the room is the glow of Chirrut’s soul, are the Force in him peeking out. Chirrut is so full of the Force that it spills along the edges of him, crests when he moves so that every footfall almost leaves marks of it behind like wet feet on stone. This, Baze thinks, is why it is so glorious to watch him fight, every movement is not just him but the Force working through him, following him, undulating in the press of his limbs, evident in the flex of muscles, and the way that he flows, glides, churns from one moment to the next.

(Forcedancer Baze called him once with so much pride dripping from his voice that he went red from ears to chest at the sound of his own words and was surprised to see that Chirrut looked just as undone by it. Now he only says it in their room, when they are like this, when the rest of the world is gone, faded away to something that exists beyond a door and not with them. Forcedancer, he will whisper when they shudder against each other, when his skin feels like Chirrut’s skin, when they can only find air inside each other, when their fingers are quick and slow and everywhere, when time has expanded to a point that it never passes, that each moment lasts forever. Forcedancer, Forcedancer, he will repeat until Chirrut has lost all words, which is a rare thing, which is a thing that Baze relishes being able to do, would almost keep tallies of the times he has managed it if it didn’t seem crude. Forcedancer, and Chirrut will quake, the universe will expand, they are lost inside of it and each other.

I will never know anyone else. I will never need to know anyone else. I will only have need of you. I only want you. Sometimes his thoughts are young and foolish, sometimes his thoughts betray the wealth of need inside his soul, and he feels poorly about it, how not right it is to hang so many hopes on one person, but Baze Malbus is nothing if not found wanting in areas. So devoted that the devotion can become a burden in and of itself sometimes. But Chirrut always seems to catch him out, press a kiss to his wrist or his neck or his lips. Kisses always. A path of them strewn across his body to lead him home again.)

“Lying,” Chirrut murmurs, digs his chin into Baze’s chest with a twitch of his head even as he blinks, slow, every eyelash a wonder that Baze’s gaze traces softly, counting. Chirrut’s lashes are too long, too soft, too plentiful a thing. They are a distraction from the rest of him, solid, honed for battles, quick and muscular enough to land Baze on his back on the ground and then carry him over his shoulder without tiring. Speed and strength and grace and stamina, Chirrut has all of them. Sonnets have been written about people with far fewer virtues than the wealth that Chirrut possesses. Of course Chirrut is also cheeky and wanton, also plays pranks and drifts during classes and becomes cocky, thinking he knows everything already anyway. These should perhaps balance out the virtues, make them lesser somehow, but to Baze it just makes them more. Everything about him is a virtue even all the irritating, annoying, quarrelsome little things.

Like the way Chirrut will boldface call him out for the liar that he is with that grin, sharp and bright, and press his chin into his chest. Baze can only huff out a laugh even as he runs his fingers up the nape of Chirrut’s neck, into and over the soft, shorn hairs on his head, which make the most pleasant sound in the world, like rushing water, like the wind through the strange grass they grow in the temple garden for medicines.

“What is my weakness then?” he asks, wary, almost holding his breath, worried that Chirrut will get to the heart of things with the knifepoint of his mind. Baze is knowledgeable on anything he can read, but his mind can slow when it comes to things like this, the back and forth jab of their wit against each other. He overthinks, plots out eleven things to say until he finds the right one, but by that time the moment has passed. Though he is getting better. And every time they banter back and forth, Chirrut’s breathing gets labored in the same way it does when he practices for hours. Baze likes hearing it that way and has vowed to continue getting better with the rapid fire wordplay, always wants to make Chirrut react physically to him like that, fast breathing and awkward, strange swallowing and eyes that will skate over the planes of his body quickly, with wanting in the dark, star bright depths.

“Kisses.” The smile turns smug and pleased, drowsy with happiness.

Baze laughs, pulls him forward to kiss him, slow and deep, no rushing, just mouths and tongues and breath mingling, souls slipping from one body to another, intertwining, perfection. I could weave a basket of you, a blanket, a shawl. I could make endless skeins of thread from the substance of both of us wrapped together, gold and rust and brown and rose and blue, he thinks as the moments pass slow, time suddenly honey thick, never breaking until they are both winded, panting for air and still close, so close. Baze presses their foreheads together, his fingers continuing to ripple through the hair on the back of Chirrut’s head, drinking in that rustling sound like temple wine, drunk on it. “You’re right. I am doomed.”

Chirrut licks his lips, and Baze cannot look at anything but his lips, his tongue. “We both are.” He presses closes until they are lip to lip again, touching but not quite a kiss, not yet, just on the precipice, and Baze does not move, waits to see where this is going. “Say it,” Chirrut says, his voice as rough as if his throat is full of knives that have stabbed the words on their journey up. “Say it.” There is a waver there, a desperation that Baze would like to taste, would like to scoop from his mouth and roll into his own, swallow it so that it burns through his body like starlight, like a sun.

“Forcedancer,” he croons and closes the distance so that Chirrut’s groan is released into his mouth. Yes, he thinks. Yes, we are both doomed; he would have it no other way.


	4. 16. Roses are red, Violets are blue, You can do whatever you want to me. (please do.)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Modern SpiritAssassin AU. Very vague, alluded to background homophobia but nothing explicit.

It starts as a joke. It starts because Jyn, in her flat direct Jyn way, asks a simple question, "Do you guys have anything planned for Valentine's Day?" It means nothing. It is just idle chitchat from her lips, a random question that has more to do with a date on the calendar than anything else. This is Jyn. Who does not pry because she does not really know what to do with personal information anyway, certainly doesn't want it. No, Jyn would rather someone ask her for help fixing their car than ask her for help with a personal crisis. Jyn does not want to see tears. Jyn does not want to know about the disquietude that sometimes haunts people alone at night when the darkness makes the inside of the soul rattle and shake like a tree limb against a window pane in fall when the wind is high.

Jyn doesn't want to know because hearing about other people makes her examine the broken pieces inside of herself, and that has never been her goal. Don't linger. Don't stick. Move on. Shove it aside. Move on. Lock it up. Lock it away. Go to the next thing, next name, next job, next apartment, next town. Never settle anywhere for long.

Except that she has been here for nine months, two weeks and five days already and not one fiber of her body is demanding that she leave yet. In another town, with other people, this would be disquieting, it would bother her. As it is, though, she feels something she has not felt in a very long time. She feels calm. It's not happiness, but that's fine. Jyn doesn't think she would know that even if it came to her door with a sign around it's neck to proclaim its name, blasting some obnoxious song through the speakers of a boombox, swearing undying love; she would probably just close the door in its face to drown out all the noise. This is contentment, and it's okay. It's fine. It calms her when she wakes in the middle of the night feeling like there's a hand at her throat and the desire to pack in her bones. She just breaths, the way Chirrut taught her, and it settles, she can sleep. 

It's fucking weird, but it's not unpleasant.

She learns to make chitchat the way other people do. She asks about holiday plans the way other people do. People with ties, people with friends, people who finally allow themselves to care. This is part of the process of integrating into a group, after all.

And Baze, who recognizes this for what it is, a hand held out, a first grasping attempt at normal everyday friendships cannot deny her because that might send her hurtling through the night without so much as a goodbye, beating her steady way onward on her broken bird wings. So even though he really doesn’t want to get into it, doesn’t like sharing, as content with being quiet and working on physical things as Jyn herself normally is, he decides that he will answer. Only because it is important; only because it is Jyn. 

Later, when they are home curled around each other on the couch while Chirrut reads with his fingers and hums and Baze sketches, he knows that Chirrut will grin and tease him about this, claim that Baze is just as big of a softie as ever, that he bends over backwards for the kids he hires to work at the bakery, that he isn’t fooling anyone with his gruff bear routine. And Baze will just grumble, like said gruff bear, and pull Chirrut into his lap to hush his mouth with kisses because that is the best and normally only way to win an argument with his partner. Chirrut, of course, is right, but Baze is loathe to admit it, which they both know, though it never stops him from trying to wrangle it out of him one way or another. 

Jyn clears her throat pointedly even as her hands flash through the process of cutting the large mound of beige dough into small sections waiting to be shaped. Neither Baze nor Jyn work the counter; they exist in the press of hot air filled with yeast and sugar and flour behind the kitchen door. They wander around the machinery, old and loud but much loved, each and every one of the pieces as liable to break as to work, but it’s okay because between the two of them they have found that they can fix anything. Jyn coaxes metal gears back into grinding away by first shouting profanities at them and then plying them with sweet words while Baze can completely strip out and rebuild the stand mixer’s inner workings in a few hours. Things break but nothing ever breaks for long or forever.

Baze sighs, dipping a spoon into the buttercream to taste, asses the texture and the flavor. He starts with base recipes but never follows them, tosses them aside to play the mad scientist--Chirrut’s words, always said in a sing song tone and with that bright tooth smile on his face that means he is proud, full of it, ready to burst with it like a balloon inflated too much--and adjusts things on the fly, makes one of a kind creations that will never been seen again. It’s why their bakery is so popular, especially with the younger crowd who post and tweet and hashtag them. Baze tries to be gruff and grumble about it all, but he can’t find it in him. He loves watching them flock to the store with their brightly colored hair and piercings, lines of ink dotting their skin, dressed in their ever-changing fashions, preening for each other and themselves, sometimes just so dismissive of the lingering, withering looks angled their way by the older self-proclaimed sensible customers. Chirrut whispers that half of it is because Baze sees himself in these children, finds the streak of their own rebellion waving at him from perfectly shaped undercuts, a welcoming hello in every Pride flag shirt or piece of jewelry, every anarchy tattoo, every blue mohawk, and half because Baze has always been soft at the edges when it comes to children, always wanted to protect them.

Always wanted them.

And, even though he led himself there, that revelation will make Chirrut sigh sadly and wander away for his meditation, all crossed legs and closed eyes and murmurs that Baze can hear and feel in every inch of their shop when he presses his hands against something or when he toes his shoes off to stand barefoot on the floor, which is a bad practice in the kitchen but still something he indulges in occasionally. Chirrut has always filled every space that he enters, sinks into the very bones of buildings as though he is some sort of spirit, miring himself into wood and metal, leaving pieces of himself behind in everything without ever diminishing himself. It is just another wondrous trick he can do.   
They never talk about adoption anymore because it only upsets both of them; Chirrut more than him because Chirrut thinks it is his fault because of his blindness as much as because they are two gay Chinese men living in a college town that is still slightly on the backwards side, running a bakery that is popular with one portion of the population and is boycotted by another faction of the town who only sees them as having some sort of agenda. 

Baze’s only agenda is to make delicious things and through that to make people happy, especially Chirrut. Chirrut’s agenda is to protect Baze’s heart from the arrows and the stones thrown by the very people he tries to please. Sometimes both of them fail all day. So they pick back up and try again on the next.

And sometimes, when it is very bad, Baze wonders why they don’t leave. Then the door will chime, and he will hear the voices of the students, the ones that he knows, the ones that come every single day, and he will remember. Brightly colored hair, tattoos, leather jackets with patches about NASA and peace and love being stronger than hate. Hope. Hope will cross the threshold, and it is enough to sustain him. Again. Probably always.

No, they have no children of their own, but they have the small clutch of young people that Baze hires and inevitably cares for, takes under his wing, gets strangely dad-like about. Chirrut does as well, though he hides it better, carries it in the sleeves of his robes, tucked up inside them as though nestled into pockets, only taken out when they have need of him. Like how he taught Jyn to meditate because she was a vibrating wire about to snap at every instant or how he has been working with Bodhi who still stutters and get flustered when there are too many people in the shop, the clamor becoming too much for him sometimes. They have each other to care for, and this long line of students, workers and patrons alike. 

It is enough.

Just Chirrut would be enough, which is something that Baze whispers in the dark sometimes when he goes upstairs to find Chirrut hunkered, praying, all the lights out, their apartment so quiet and still that Baze wonders whether he has walked into another world altogether. Until Chirrut smiles at him, and every light in the universe shines. Just for him.

Jyn makes the noise that means she thinks she is being dismissed or ignored and the shuck of metal through dough grows louder as she works. It rouses Baze from his thoughts, which can be a long tunnel he gets lost in, a deep ocean where he can linger forever. He shakes his head and puts the tasting spoon aside, adds slightly more lemon juice and powdered sugar and bright pieces of crystallized ginger to the buttercream, talks as he folds the ingredients in to achieve the perfect consistency. “Valentine’s is busy. There are always custom orders and demands for cakes and cookies and things.” Too much time needing to be spent to make the day wonderful for everyone else.

“So. Nothing then?” There is something in her voice now, something beyond her normally flat affect, which unnerves some people but never bothers Baze, that flashes like a hidden knife in the gleam of the sun. And then it passes. “It’s just some stupid commercial holiday anyway.” With that Jyn begins to shape the bread loaves, one after the other, quickly but with care because Jyn often comes off as a raincloud about to burst but there is sunlight within, unsure of how exactly to escape.

They settle back into the companionable silence of the kitchen, which is never actually quiet because the machines run and tick around them, but all of that becomes background noise after a while, a wall of comforting, known sound like a heavy blanket to soothe the senses. As Baze frosts the cupcakes with the buttercream, he wonders. They have never done anything to mark Valentine’s Day, and he cannot remember why, cannot recall whether this was intentional or just something that happened. It has never meant much to him. Baze takes care to ensure that Chirrut knows the depth of his affection each and every single day. The idea of just one day to mark that idea is odd, too simple, an easy out. When he was younger, he might have chalked this up to their brand of being anti-establishment, but he is older now, more sentimental as Chirrut likes to tease him, and he wonders. 

When he slips out of the kitchen door, a quick excuse thrown over his shoulder at Jyn, she only smiles at him as if she knows, as if this has all been a ploy, some plot, and he wouldn’t put it past her and Chirrut to be in cahoots over something, but Baze cannot allow himself to linger on that or it will eclipse his forward momentum and mire him back in the kitchen. Baze is not Chirrut; he does not shift gears as quickly, and he must let his impetus carry him while it exists or find himself stranded, unable to move, stuck. 

A week later, he presents the gift. The first Valentine’s Day gift he has ever given Chirrut. It is just a bear. Nothing fancy. No flowers or chocolates or jewelry because their life has always been simple, and Chirrut loves the confections he makes more than any commercial chocolate available. It is just a bear, but it talks when its belly is pressed, in Baze’s voice, in Baze’s deep, wandering river, earth moving Mandarin because it is just for them, after all. It says something silly that Chirrut once found on the internet and laughed about for three hours, which Baze remembers because he loves to hear Chirrut like that, voice breaking from being out of breath because of glee for such an extended period of time.

“Roses are red, violets are blue. You can do whatever you want to me. Please do,” the bear intones in Mandarin when Chirrut plucks it from Baze’s hands.

Baze had blushed the entire time while trying to record it even though the employee at the store obviously had no idea what was happening, what he was saying, but she was kind enough and patient enough to help him make the attempt six times before it was right, before his voice did not waver in an unwelcome way. He can only look down while his listens to the mechanical play of his voice from the bear, but he can feel Chirrut’s smile through the floor, leeching into the boards and travelling through the grain to his bare feet.

“Anything?” Chirrut asks, his Mandarin always cleaner and crisper than Baze’s own, clear indications of their upbringings that only they know how to parse in this town, and that is when Baze allows himself to look up, to find his partner’s eyes, veiled and turned just a hair away from where he stands but close enough because Chirrut is very good at this by now.

“Yes,” Baze answers, mind spinning through all the things that Chirrut might ask of him, each of them dear and wonderful and welcome. He is on the verge of apologizing for the silly gift, for its sentimentality, for caving to societal capitalistic pressure; Chirrut’s smile stops him, it speaks of something else, and he wonders again whether Jyn’s question was not just idle talk at all, whether it was part of something bigger.

He gets his answer when Chirrut, bear tucked lovingly under one arm, starts fishing through his pockets until he finds a small wooden box, which he holds out in Baze’s general direction. “This. This is what I want.”

Baze recognizes the box, knows what lingers inside, a titanium band with rose gold running through the middle like a river. He has seen it before, and he told Chirrut to wait because he was worried about the world around them, concerned about political climate and family and. He hurt Chirrut’s feelings, soundly enough that he worried it might break them asunder, though it didn’t. He hasn’t seen the box since. And now there it is, on Chirrut’s palm, presented back to him, and Baze agreed to anything. Baze has never been a man who backs out of promises. 

“Baze,” Chirrut’s voice is strong as steel, but Baze can hear the way it wavers, the slight dip of concern that dances across his tongue because it tickles the soles of his feet through the floor. “Will you marry me?”

When Chirrut had asked the first time, both of them barely older than twenty-five, Baze’s heart and throat had clenched so hard that he thought he might die from the fear. There is none of that now. There is just the light of Chirrut’s smile invading his entire body, and the calmness he feels surrounded by the kitchen machine noises. There is the smell of ginger and yeast that permeates the entire building always like Chirrut’s mantras, which he thinks have soaked into the walls such that they would play back like a record if he rubbed his hand over them. Nothing here scares him, nothing here worries him not even the looks they sometimes get on the street, the disdainful ones. They are so few these days. 

Baze closes the distance between them, hand folding over the box and Chirrut’s fingers in the same grasp even as his other arm wraps around him, pulls him snugly against him, pulls him into a kiss that is just as ardent as any they shared when they were young and could barely contain their desire for one another. Kissing Chirrut is always like this, like a match being struck throughout his entire body. When he pulls away, his breathing is ragged like he has been running.

“You haven’t answered me.”  
“Did you entice Jyn into helping you?”

“You haven’t answered me.”

“You haven’t either.”

“I asked first.”

Their back and forth is nothing new, all the words soaking into the building around them, and Baze hopes that structures carry on the light and souls of the people who lived inside them once they are gone because he needs to know that pieces of Chirrut will continue to be bright and infuriating even when he can no longer be that himself. He wants to think that there will be a patch of earth wherein he and Chirrut’s loving bickering continues forever, a recording to ease or haunt the next people who claim it as their own. 

They answer in unison because their hearts have always beat together, “Yes.”


	5. 47. If they invented a way to actually have sex over the internet you and I could use that glorious technology for internet hugs. (You know, when I wasn’t using it for sex.)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More modern AU in which Baze is a literature/creative writing professor and Chirrut is an actor and a small stolen moment while Baze is away for work.

It is an unfortunate fact of their life that sometimes their jobs require them to travel. When they can, of course, they go together, but that cannot always be the case because of the difficulty in arranging schedules and making the necessary accommodations. Sometimes, they are forced to be apart despite the fact that it is one of Baze’s least favorite things about being an adult. As a child, he’d had the strange idea that once he was grown he would be able to do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. Of course, considering that he was an anxiety-prone introvert with a healthy dash of curmudgeon most of what he had pictured himself wanting to do was staying home, reading or baking or fiddling around in the garden, away from people, away from noise, away from all the unrealistic expectations of others that he constantly seemed to burden himself with once he started wadding in among people. 

When they were younger, soon after they had met, back when they were just starting to feel their way into attraction and dating, back when they still hid under the umbrella of just being very close friends despite the fact that both of them knew it was so much more than that, Chirrut used to tease him about being born an old man. The kind likely to shake a cane at youngsters on his lawn. To which Baze would frown and make aggravated noises in his throat, the sort that always served to prove Chirrut’s point, and then make the kind of statement that would send the other into uproarious laughter. Like how if he had spent months tending to seedlings and pruning hedges, then it was his right to be picky about whether or not people were treating those things correctly.

Chirrut would laugh, long and loud. Chirrut would clap his hands over his eyes or his mouth or cross his arms over his belly, and just laugh as if he had never heard anything more hilarious in the entire world. And Baze would just watch him, unable to even be upset at being teased anymore because Chirrut was beautiful. Chirrut was beautiful, and he wanted him to be his in every single way that intention could be made. 

And now he is.

Even if they are currently separated by several time zones and too many miles, trying to communicate through a bad internet connection that keeps dropping. Baze groans, frustrated with everything about the situation other than Chirrut himself who is chipper and gleeful and positive as always. Baze thinks that the warmth coming through the screen has more to do with Chirrut’s smile than the laptop itself. He knows it doesn’t make any sense. He knows that technology does not work this way, but that doesn’t matter. To him, the warmth is Chirrut. To him, the sun in the sky is Chirrut. It’s always been this way with them.

“Baze?” Chirrut’s voice is tinny, discordant in a way that it is not when they are face to face. “Are you there?”

Baze hates the computer completely, hates the distance, wishes he was curled up in their bed instead of being here, having to sit through lectures and giving his own presentations to a bunch of colleagues who think he is wrong but are too polite to say anything except, “Perhaps you have a point, Doctor Malbus” with their faces held just so, and Baze might not be the best at social situations but he has learned what those faces mean: that they think he is wrong, that they think he is being subversive and looking for things that are not there, that his lifestyle twists what he sees. They seem to have forgotten that literature is as much a game of interpretation as it is a reflection of the author’s intent. He cannot even count the number of times that he has praised a student’s use of themes only to discover that the student didn’t even know they had done it until he pointed it out. The mind is a trick, the mind is a labyrinth with a minotaur racing through it. If you get distracted by the minotaur, you miss the beauty of the maze completely. 

“Baze?” Chirrut’s voice comes again, slight worry tinging it this time, and Baze pulls himself back from his mental quandaries, back to his sun. 

“I am here, Chirrut. Can you hear me, love?” 

He remembers the first day he called Chirrut the sun. They were hand in hand strolling across campus, Baze reciting Auden’s poem about Icarus, Chirrut listening, rapt, head tilted toward him, cane tapping lightly against the walk so as not to drown out his voice. When he’d finished, Baze had squeezed Chirrut’s hand tighter, told him he understood the boy’s quest to put on wings and fly toward something beautiful even if it was dangerous. 

“You’re still talking in poetry. Can you make that a little clearer for me please?” Chirrut asked, though grinning like he just wanted to make Baze talk more. It was something Chirrut always said he couldn’t get enough of, Baze’s voice.

“The sun. Icarus desired the sun so much that he was willing to fly to what was, ultimately, his death. Love was his tragic flaw.”

Chirrut shrugged. “It sounds like his tragic flaw was being stubborn about wanting to fuck Apollo. He could have set his sights a little lower and been fine. Surely there were plenty of not god dudes walking around that would have been happy to fuck him. Genius inventor and escape artist. They would have been lined up around the block. Instead, he goes after the one piece of ass he can’t have? Fatal flaw there.”

“Maybe none of the other boys compared. Maybe none of the other boys ever compared to the sun.” Baze was fumbling, nervous, felt pinned to the spot like a butterfly behind glass even though Chirrut’s gaze was sightless. He could not really run him through with those eyes, it just felt like it, always had, like he could see into his soul, which was a little disquieting when Baze often felt like he left something to be desired.

“The sun, huh?” Chirrut repeated, head still tilted, but the smirk on his lips was a little different now. “You have an ulterior motive here, don’t you?” Blind but able to see right through him, able to see right through everything.

Baze squeezed Chirrut’s hand a little tighter. “Don’t make it sound so nefarious.”

“You’re reading into things. I never make anything sound nefarious. Unless it’s Halloween, and I’m intentionally trying to scare children.”

“One day your pranks are going to result in your house getting egged.”

Chirrut waved a hand in the air, dismissing the idea completely. “It’s fine. You’ll clean it off. You’ll mutter and complain and grouse about it the entire time, but you’ll clean it off.”

It took Baze at least thirteen seconds to process what had just been said even though he had, more or less, been dreaming of something similar since they were fourteen, since the first time that they had kissed. He had to swallow three times and clear his throat once before he could speak again and even then it was only one shabbily constructed question. “What was that?”

“I said, you’ll clean the eggs off our house when I inevitably frustrate some child into throwing them.”

“Oh.”

And then Chirrut’s face did something that Baze did not often see it do, it fell a little bit with concern. On anyone else, it would have looked like fear, but this was Chirrut, and Baze didn’t think he had ever seen him look afraid. “Oh? As in, oh you don’t want to clean the eggs off our house or as in oh you don’t want a house with me?”

This was not the way that Baze had ever envisioned this conversation happening, and he felt struck stupid and worthless. “Oh as in I can’t believe how lucky I am to have a hypothetically egg covered house with you.”

The concern that had lingered on Chirrut’s face fell away as quickly as clouds sliding over the sun, and he was dazzling again, smiling. “I didn’t think that was such a forward statement considering it seemed like you were comparing me to the sun. Unless I was wrong. Was I wrong? Was that just random literary discourse and not you courting me? It’s gotten harder for me to tell since you’ve started formally studying poetry. I used to assume every pretty thing you said was about me but now that’s not always true.”

Baze kissed him, not caring who saw despite the fact that they were standing in the middle of the quad. “Every pretty thing I say is still about you. I love you, and you are my sun.”

“Oh. Good.” The smug smile was back when Chirrut patted his cheek fondly. “I’m so glad I’m not wrong.”

They had laughed the entire way back to the dorm, and Baze had felt as light as a cloud, as consumed with giddiness as he imagined Icarus must have felt while his wings were beating him steadily onward and upward before the wax began to melt and drip and the feathers fell away. Chirrut was a kinder sun, and Baze was sure that his trip would not end the same way. 

Back in the here and now, Chirrut is saying, “I can hear you, but I can’t see you so you might want to check the camera.”

“You’re blind,” Baze says, voice as flat and toneless as it always is when it comes to this conversation.

“Baze Malbus!” Chirrut, as usual, sounds like he is just hearing this news for the first time in his life and is gutted by it. Baze loves him. “How could you not tell me this sooner? I just thought all the lights were too low!”

“All the lights?”

“All the lights!”

“In the whole world?”

“In the whole world!”

This is how it goes with Baze’s voice showing no emotion, and Chirrut sounding like he is in the middle of one of his great Shakespearean monologues, pitching his voice perfectly so that it will carry through the theater even without microphones. He does hand gestures as well, broad, sweeping things that Baze likes to watch because he loves his hands as much as the rest of him. 

They only stop when Baze can’t contain his laughter anymore, doubles over, face in his hands, chuckling, and he is warm inside and out now because that is another one of Chirrut’s gifts, lifting him up from dark places just by being himself. 

“Baze.”

“Yes, love.”

“You know what would be great?”

“If I were home.”

Chirrut screws his face up like Baze has ruined something and then waves a hand in the air as a dismissal. His eyes are canted to the left, but they still look like they could slice right through to someone’s soul and steal all their secrets. It’s a power he never needed with Baze. Baze gave all of his up of his own accord. “I mean, that would also be nice but was not what I was thinking.”

Baze thinks he has an idea of where this is headed and is glad that he is already done with everything for the night, already in bed in nothing but boxer briefs. Easy access. He drops his voice, husky, for the question because he knows that does things to his husband. “Chirrut, what were you thinking?”

On the other side of the screen, on the other side of the country, Chirrut visibly shifts, looks not unnerved so much as ruffled, and now it is Baze’s turn to smirk. “Not that. You’re terrible.”

“Only for you.”

Chirrut doesn’t even acknowledge that he has spoken. “I was thinking that someone should invent a way that people could have sex over the internet.”

Maybe this is actually going where Baze assumed it was going, after all. “Oh? Don’t they already have that? I mean, it’s basically phone sex only with. Only like what we’re doing now.” If he mentions the camera, Chirrut is liable to considering having another over the top fit about the fact that he is blind and while that is endearing, it’s not normally the way that Baze gets in the mood. Of course, he’s been here, without his husband, for a week, and that makes the mood easier to find by sheer fact that he misses Chirrut enough to ache. It’s not just the sex, either. It’s never been that. It’s waking up next to him and falling asleep next to him. It’s just having someone there who knows him so well, who he knows so well. 

If he keeps thinking about things like this, he is decidedly not going to be in the mood for anything other than whispering love poetry to Chirrut until they both fall asleep, which is also not a bad idea.

On the screen, Chirrut is shaking his head, his hands gesticulating again. “No, no. I don’t mean that farce. I mean actual sex. With real touching. No more being separated by distance.”

Baze frowns and is glad that Chirrut cannot see him because he wouldn’t want to inadvertently hurt his feelings with the reaction. “I don’t know how that could possibly work.”

“I’m not asking you to invent it. I’m just asking you to imagine the possibilities.”

Oh. “Yeah?”

“Then I could hold you no matter how far away you are.”

The statement is so gentle, so kind and utterly loving that it brings tears to Baze’s eyes in seconds. That is not what he had been expecting. Not because Chirrut is not kind or loving normally but because of the two of them, Baze is the sap. Baze is the one who buys flowers and candies and fixes three-course elegant dinners and once took a soap making class so that he’d have the perfect Valentine’s day gift, but then Chirrut ended up being allergic to the ingredients and was itchy for a week. Chirrut typically shows affection in more physical ways, and his words tend to be a little more direct than flowery. 

“Are you still there, Baze?” he asks after a moment, mouth pressed into a line, brow furrowed slightly, afraid that the connection has dropped probably.

“Always, my love.” 

There’s a moment where he can see Chirrut ready to point out how he is not always there, all the logical and normal ways in which he is physically separated from him when he thinks better of it and stills. “Wouldn’t that be nice?”

Baze brushes his fingers over the screen, imagines that it is Chirrut’s cheek, Chirrut’s lips. Pretends the warmth of the screen is the warmth of his skin, the sun of it. “Yes.”

“Don’t you dare cry.”

“I’m not.”

“Sentimental fool.” Chirrut clicks his tongue, but Baze knows it is not out of annoyance. Baze knows practically everything that Chirrut does perfectly by now, but sometimes his husband still manages to surprise him. Pleasantly. Like tonight.

“Would you have me any other way?”

There is the mischievous gleam in his smirk. “Well, now that you mention it, you spread out on this bed,” but then he stops with a wink and switches tactics again. “No, my heart. I would have you no other way.”

Baze chuckles. “I am surprised though, bright one.”

“By?”

“The fact that you would want it for that over sex.”

“Oh. No. I would use it for the sex, too. All the sex. Lots of sex. Constantly. But I figured you’d appreciate it more if I went with the sentimental option.”

Baze is laughing so hard that he cannot answer, but he knows that Chirrut can hear his mirth by the smile stretched across his face. Bright, glowing, the sun. Baze prefers the darkness, prefers the ground, hates stepping into unknown, new territory, hates venturing out of his house to plod through the more political things that come with being a member of academia, but he will never tire of flying as far or as high as he needs to in order to be near his personal sun.


	6. 19. When I look at you all I can see are the mistakes we’re going to make. (The future’s so bright.)

19\. When I look at you all I can see are the mistakes we’re going to make. (The future’s so bright.)

The masters have told Chirrut that the Force works in mysterious ways, and it’s not that he doesn’t believe them but they say it with something like fear, something like trepidation, and he doesn’t think it’s anything like that at all. At least not for him. For him it’s ghosting his fingers through a stream, dipping them into the water and then pulling them back again. It’s normal and pleasant. Sometimes it’s scary because you don’t know how deep the water will be, how cold, or whether anything lingers under the surface, but there’s still the sense that it will not hurt you, a security in the fact that it is there at all.

He is seven when the Force visions start, and they never leave him. It can be hard to know how much time will pass between each one, whether they will come to pass at all or if there are just strange echoes, ripples in the water of the Force that inundates his life. Where they startled him when they first began, he grows used to them, and they become nothing other than something that has always been there, like the tree in the temple garden with its night-blooming flowers that so many of the other initiates never see because it is cold on Jedha, especially after the sun sets, so they are not supposed to linger there. But Chirrut has seen them with his eyes and with the Force; he’s never been sure which version of his sight offers up the more beautiful images.

He is fourteen, practically a Guardian already in his own mind when the masters bring someone new to meet him. This boy is older than him, taller, but thin in the ways of the members of the Whills who practice body asceticism, a path that initiates are not allowed to explore due to the extreme toil it can render on mind and body. The masters tell him that the boy, initiate Baze Malbus, has been transferred to NiJedha from a sister Whills temple in the Jedhan sands, that he is here because his own temple found him to be too alone, too pious. The sand temple had no younglings, very few masters, a handful of guardians. With no other children near, Malbus had latched on to the teachings of the masters and guardians themselves, emulating their quests for enlightenment and knowledge of the Force even when he was told that some of those paths were closed to him. It was decided that he would do better in NiJedha, among peers and the masters could not think of anyone better to bring him to first than their very own troublemaker. Perhaps between the two of them, some sort of happy medium could be found.

The masters make the introductions and provide small amounts of information before leaving them in their room together to become acquainted. Chirrut is told to ensure that initiate Malbus attends lessons and meals. They do not say it, but he knows, that they want him to make sure that the new boy eats. It would give him a sense of pride at having been given a task to complete if he didn’t feel a little like he has been assigned a strange pet.

Chirrut sits on his bed, the new boy sits on the floor, lips moving, already deep in prayer or Force meditation. Chirrut isn’t sure which because he cannot hear the words clearly, just feels the sense of them in the air. The very air around Malbus is somber like days of mourning when a member of the Whills passes, shadowed like the temple when the rare rains roll in, clouds blotting out the sky. It’s a strange way to seek the Force, melancholy, studious, almost sad, and it feels nothing like the energy that Chirrut has felt move around him, move through him for almost all the days of his life.

He is practically a Guardian already, at least in his own mind, and he has been tasked with keeping watch over this initiate, with helping him adjust to the ways of the NiJedhan temple. Chirrut doesn’t even think anything of it when he lowers himself onto the floor and reaches a hand out, sure, without any thought of possible consequence, to settle onto Malbus’ arm.

One moment, he is simply settling his fingers down on someone else’s flesh, no different than anyone, not abnormal or out of the ordinary or terribly special, just a hand on an arm. One moment, he is just there in his room, reaching out to help the new initiate get acquainted, to try and show him that it is not all gray no matter what he has been shown or learned before. One moment it is that, and the next moment it is something else completely.

Chirrut has had Force visions since he was seven, but he has never felt anything like the wave that rolls over him in that instant of skin to skin contact. This is less a vision and more like being submerged in something, suddenly surrounded on all sides, blanketed by it. At first, there is nothing other than the sound of a crash and what seems to be stars all around, glowing and blazing across the sky as though trapped in the middle of some dance that cannot quite be seen with the eye. Then it is pictures, moments, so many of them, one after another, that it is like flipping through the pages of a book, getting an idea about all of it without ever really seeing any of it properly because it is gone too too fast.

But some of it sticks. Some of it remains.

Hand in hand under the tree in the temple garden at night, pointing out the flowers that bloom there, a laugh that is shy and yet as deep as standing at the edge of the precipice of the mesa, looking down to the desert. Fingers brushing over his cheek, shy, shy as anything, and a kiss that is brief but perfect. Dark, sad eyes, always wet, always threatening to spill over if something that is too much happens and then tricking them into laughing, into forgetting the weight of the whole entire universe, the weight of the Force. Hands in hair, hands on skin, lips on skin, laughing, speaking in low rumbles, words of love exchanged back and forth, again and again, a chain that never ends, a rope held between them, not tied, never tied, never a burden but taken willingly. Training together, a seemingly endless montage of kicks and sweeps, laughing, one besting the other but always with a smile and lingering kisses. Bodies tangled in sheets, tangled together, hair curled around fingers, long, long and wavy and full of secrets that Chirrut has put there for later when they have more time. So much, so many details, so many things on those pages, but there is always an end. Every story has an end and this one is no different. A voice screaming not to go, hand in hand, pain, nothing. A burning. A returning.

When the water recedes, slowly, slowly, not all at once, not wanting to leave a void for something else to rush into, Chirrut realizes that he is on the ground, breathing hard, clutching on to Baze’s hand while he murmurers things in the language of the sands, which is not high Jedhan and so Chirrut cannot completely understand the words but the tone, the tone is comfort and the feel of his hand is familiar now because the Force works in strange ways. Maybe it should be a warning. Maybe he should tell the masters, have them send the new initiate back to his home temple to become whatever he would become there. It would spare him some pains, Chirrut knows, because he remembers them, blazing, burning, scars seemingly blooming beneath his touch even though he knows that’s not where they came from, just a trick of the memory, of the vision.

It might spare him the ending that Chirrut saw. It might spare his life. Yet he does not think he can.

“Are you alright?” These words are high Jedhan, though the accent behind them is different, thick, not quite used to it yet.

Chirrut isn’t sure how to answer that because how do you tell someone when you have seen the light behind the curtain, how do you tell someone that you have seen the future stretched out like a scroll and know where it stops? “Did you see it?” He does not want to be alone in this. Even knowing that he will not be alone, the threat of it seems to seize his heart, which not stop racing no matter how hard he tries to calm it.

Baze shakes his head slowly, and Chirrut can see his cheekbones. There is a strange hesitation in the movement, though, so Chirrut waits until the words come, bubbling up like water from the ground in the kyber caves far below them. “I felt something. Like a,” he waves the hand that is not still in Chirrut’s in the air as though questing for the right words in high Jedhan. “A web? Or a weaving. Like a tapestry.”

The admission, this hint of a shared experience helps Chirrut’s breathing finally begin to slow. “Did it feel like the Force?”

“Yes.” Baze’s words seem to be sparse, only as much as needed, and Chirrut knows, though he probably shouldn’t, though it probably isn’t the best thing to know, that this is a habit that will always remain.

His eyes are deep and dark and wet like rain showers linger there, and Chirrut recalls the way he already knows he will laugh. It should feel more like a burden, he thinks, but he realizes that it doesn’t. Not really. Because for all the sad things, he remembers how bright it was, them together.

“Have you ever seen the night blooming jasmine of NiJedha?” he asks, stretched out on his back on the ground, Baze’s hand still clutched tightly in his own as though they both have forgotten about the causal contact, already comfortable with it, already knowing each other.

I have seen you die, Chirrut thinks. I have seen myself die with you right next to me, unyielding. It makes it all a little easier to handle, knowing someone will be there, knowing someone will care.

Baze is looking at him with confusion. “Are you alright?”

Chirrut laughs. “You’re going to ask that question many times over the years. Eventually, you’ll stop waiting for an answer.”

“Because you don’t know how to give one?”

“Because I’d rather be doing something fun instead of having you fussing over me.”

And then it happens. Baze laughs, the same laugh from the visions, rich and full and better than any sound that Chirrut has ever heard in his life. So it will be. They will grow up together, they will love each other, they will die together, but it will mean something. It will be bright.

“I would like to see your night flowers.”

Of course you would. You always will. “Wonderful. We’ll sneak out tonight. After dinner.” He looks at Baze, the too gaunt face, and the image of the scar that will eventually settle there flashes before his eyes before it falls away again. “You have to eat. That’s not your path now.”

“I know.” Baze settles down onto his back on the floor next to him but still does not let go of his hand. “I felt it.” They are both quiet for a moment before he continues. “Will you tell me what you saw?”

Chirrut thinks of it, the long winding road of it, the rush of it, the fall. “Not today, Baze. Ask me tomorrow.”

Next to him, the other boy hums in consideration. “At least tell me if it was admirable.”

“There were mistakes, but they were worth it. It was bright. It was good. Heroic even. What did it feel like to you?”

It takes him a moment to find the word. “Sunlight.”

When Chirrut sighs it is with contentment. “Good.”


	7. 4. i don’t know what the fuck true love even is but i do want to hang out with you for basically the rest of my life. (let’s hang out - TO THE DEATH)

They have been dating for three years, six months, four weeks, two days, fifteen hours, twenty-seven minutes, and approximately ten seconds when Chirrut turns on his heel like a man possessed by a sudden, swelling urge–which is normal when it comes to Chirrut, Baze thinks, because he is always this way, always like the wind, mercurial and shifting, though this is not a bad thing, really, at least Baze has tried to convince himself that it is not a bad thing, get over the edge of anxiety that it makes curl in the pit of his stomach because he never knows exactly what is going to happen next–and smiles at him like the sun.

Oh no, Baze thinks but only for a moment until the warmth of the grin soothes every small, worried thing in his mind. At least for a moment. Then Chirrut starts talking.

“Baze, I’ve been thinking.”

These are dangerous words. Everything about Chirrut can be dangerous from his smile to his tongue to his quick wit, and this is not even counting what his body can do, the endless martial art forms that he has mastered. The way that Baze has seen him best everyone in sparring without seeming to even break a sweat. Chirrut is a honed blade, and Baze is the sort of person who accidentally cuts himself on the kitchen knives while washing them. Holding Chirrut sometimes seems like it is destined to end in disaster with his heart in ribbons on the floor. So when Chirrut says something pointed and dangerous, he doesn’t immediately answer him.

“Aren’t you going to ask what I’ve been thinking?” Chirrut is on the edge of pouting, his lips turning down just a little, and his eyes a touch hurt, something that Baze can never stand to see for many reasons.

Chirrut’s eyes have been declining steadily for as long as Baze has known him, far longer than they’ve been dating because there was their childhood tangled and woven together like something perfect. There was Baze waking up at three in the morning in a cold sweat sometime during their teen years with the keen and terrible realization that he was in love with his best friend but utterly unable to say the words because that is like him, unable to say words that mean something huge out of fear. Then there was the moment he returned from university to find Chirrut still there, still in town, almost as if he had been waiting, though Baze knows it’s a stupid thought. Chirrut doesn’t wait for anything. But there he was in the door of the Malbus family bakery, grinning when Baze got home, and Baze, full of something strange and new, almost possessed himself, had pulled him into a hug and then kissed him.

Three years, six months, four weeks, two days, fifteen hours, twenty-eight minutes, and approximately thirty seconds ago now. Because Chirrut kissed him back and then, in the most winded voice that Baze had ever heard from him in all their years of knowing each other, declared that they were dating, and he wouldn’t hear any reasons why they shouldn’t or couldn’t. Baze hadn’t been able to say a single thing to dissuade him, didn’t even want to despite the constant, meandering streams of fear and worry that occasionally flood their beds and soak the more sensible territories of his heart.

Chirrut loves him. He knows this fact, and yet he still worries when his lover says things out of the blue.

“Oh.” Caught. “Yes. Of course, Chirrut. What have you been thinking?”

“About asking you to marry me.”

Baze feels like he has been hit by a truck. Oddly enough, it is the best feeling in the entire world though only just. It is almost topped by the memory of the first time Chirrut whispered out the words “I love you” while they were gently and languidly exploring each other’s bodies, hands and tongues slowly traveling, no rush at all, just enjoying the dips and hollows and the way that they could make each other moan or curse. Baze always soft, soft, in whispers, and Chirrut starting out at a normal volume before building to something loud enough to potentially wake all the neighbors, something loud enough to make Baze hesitant and nervous but soaking it in and unable to shush him after the first time he shouted. Baze had heard the words before, of course, when they were young, at holidays or birthdays or just on the spur of the moment because Chirrut has always been vocal and demonstrative about affection, never hiding it. However, there was a difference in those words when whispered into the shell of Baze’s ear while Chirrut’s fingers swept over the inside of his thigh. There was a different meaning inside of them, a new cadence, something reverent, something that made Baze’s heart take flight inside of his chest, Icarus desperately hurtling toward the sun.

He’s still fearful of the eventual fall. Even now.

“I’m sorry?” he manages to mumble out, and Baze can feel the blush creeping up his ears and down his neck, flustered even though they are alone in this stretch of the field, walking hand and hand along the paths with nothing and no one to impress or bother them. Except the rushing wind or the grass, and the natural world has never seemed to mind them intruding on it. Chirrut speaks about it, sometimes, the energy behind all things, and Baze thinks that it is lovely, beautiful talk, though a bit unbelievable. Sometimes, though, he can almost feel it. When they come out to stargaze, laying on their backs on the grass, side by side, getting lost in the glimmer of the lights, long dead, in the sky. Baze pointing out constellations one by one, Chirrut making up new stories about them. It’s during those times when Baze thinks, yes, there might be something to all this talk about a universal energy, after all. It’s just harder for him in the light of day when everything is so bright and stark and real. The night is otherworldly, like Chirrut.

Chirrut’s face has fallen a bit, though not quite enough to give him away completely. He is the master of disappointed but not face. Baze is the quiet one, but Chirrut has always been the best at hiding when he needs to because he can push down all the things that tumble from Baze’s lips and eyes uncontrolled. Still, when his speaks there is rare venom on his tongue. “I said I was thinking of asking you to marry me. Seems like it was rather a stupid thought. I’ll let the wind take it.”

Baze feels like Alice in the story of Wonderland, drinking from the bottle and shrinking down to almost nothing. That is how he feels in this moment, reduced and small, especially when Chirrut slips away from his fingers to cross his arms over his chest and stride further along on the path in the field, putting an obvious distance between them. The wings on his heart seem like they are faltering, growing weaker, and he wonders whether this is the moment where they will fail, where the wax will melt and leave him tumbling back to the earth, to break all his bones, to fall into the sea, to drown, to die.

Icarus, he knows, did not give up. Icarus kept going as long as he was able with no thought about his own preservation. It’s supposed to be the moral of that story, not to reach for things that are out of your grasp, but Baze has often thought about it another way, to keep trying even though it’s scary.

He quickens his steps and reaches out to brush his fingers over Chirrut’s wrist. It is a reward when he does not immediately pull away. “I’m sorry. I know that wasn’t the response you wanted.”

“It was not as bad as it could have been.” The tone, the way the words are clipped like each one is its own sentence indicates that Chirrut is still hiding. “You didn’t laugh in my face. That’s something.”

Baze wraps his arms around Chirrut from behind, pressing his face into his neck, and can feel the way that his lover is shaking, though he is unsure whether this is from disappointment or rage. It is rare to see Chirrut undone, and he hates that he has been the cause of it in this scenario. “I would never laugh at you,” he says, and he hopes that Chirrut can hear how he means it not just in the sound of his voice but in the way the words rumble through his body

“You laugh at me all the time.” Petulant.

“Only when you want me to, my love. I would never laugh at you for this.”

“You didn’t say yes.” Chirrut continues to sound blunt and distant, but he has leaned into the embrace, trusting Baze even though they both know that Chirrut is the stronger of them. Physically, he needs protection from no one. Emotionally, Baze thinks they could both do a little better, but they are imperfect beings struggling to learn the best ways to love. Just like everyone.

Baze presses a kiss to Chirrut’s neck and places one of his hands over Chirrut’s heart where he can feel it beating double time in the universe that exists inside his lover’s body. “You surprised me. And I.”

“You worry,” Chirrut finishes before he can get there. “You worry. I can feel it. It’s in the air all around you, an energy all through you. I know, Baze, but I.” His voice shakes, and he stops speaking for a moment.

Baze tightens the embrace and presses another kiss to his neck, an unspoken way to let Chirrut know that he is safe, that he is surrounded. Ever since his eyes began failing, little by little, bit by bit, Chirrut has told Baze about his nightmares, waking in endlessly blank rooms, unable to navigate, alone, adrift. And ever since Chirrut told him that, Baze has been in the habit of offering physical support, physical reminders of his presence to calm him down. When they were younger, it was hand holding, hugs. Now that they are romantically intertwined, the reassurances remain just as intimate even if they might not always be as chaste as the ones from their childhood.

Chirrut swallows and tries again, his words a rush, raging like a river fed by too many rains, threatening to sweep cities away in its flood. “I want to marry you while I can see still the ceremony. I want to be married in the botanical gardens under the blossoms while they gather in the waves of your hair so that I can pick them out later that night when we retire to bed as husbands. I want to see what you will wear and what you look like as I divest you of it piece by piece. I want to see it, Baze, such that I will never forget it. With every moment that passes, I get closer to not being able to do so, and it breaks my heart.”

Baze is blinking away tears by the time Chirrut pauses and loosens his grip so that the man in his embrace can turn to look at him. Unsurprisingly, Chirrut’s eyes are also wet, and Baze reaches out to brush a tear away only to be frowned at, briefly, before he is allowed to run his fingers over Chirrut’s cheek. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you felt so strongly about it after such a short time.”

“A short time?” Chirrut’s voice is incredulous, his eyes wide as though someone has just told him the moon in the sky is a fake, a trick of the light.

It is almost enough to still Baze’s words in his throat, but he carries on anyway. “It has almost been four years.” To him, this seems short compared with how long he has loved this man. Baze isn’t sure what would be long enough, whether love should be measured in moments or mountains.

Chirrut still looks like he cannot believe what he is hearing. “Baze, you dense fool, it’s been forever.”

Now it is Baze’s turn to be shocked, and he is sure that his expression bests Chirrut’s. “What?”

Chirrut puts his head in his hands for several seconds, laughing into the palms, before looking back at him and clicking his tongue. “I’ve loved you forever. Did you think it was luck that I was still in town when you returned home from school? Did you think it was fate? Did you think it was happenstance that I had not gone traveling as I had talked about when we were small?” He lifts his hands to place them on either side of Baze’s face, and his eyes have gone as soft as Baze has ever seen them. “I waited for you, my silly man. I waited just for you. I would have continued waiting for you as long as it took for you to do something.”

This is another truck running into him. Loving Chirrut, knowing Chirrut is a series of trucks blindsiding him from all angles, at unknown times, and it is fine. It is fine. He loves it. “Yes, I thought. I wondered. Why you stayed.” His arms around Chirrut’s waist tighten slightly, pull him closer, though he will never be close enough, Baze knows. He will always be reaching, always wanting more. “Why didn’t you do anything?”

“You’re too easily swayed, my love. I needed to know it was you. I needed to know it was not just me convincing you.” Chirrut presses a kiss to his neck. Chirrut looks deeply and utterly moved, his face completely open, no hiding at all, and it is as bright as the sun. Baze knows how Icarus felt. He feels Icarus every day. “I wanted to tell you. I wanted to kiss you. Every day for years. And before I understood what love was, what being in love was, I just wanted to be near you always. But I needed you to feel that, too. Even when the waiting killed me.”

“You waited.”

“I was very glad you were a good student. Had you been worse, it might have taken you longer to complete your studies, and just fantasizing about you was getting repetitive. There are only so many scenarios.”

“You waited.” Baze’s voice is awestruck, and the words don’t make sense because this is Chirrut. Chirrut does not wait for things. Chirrut does not pine. Except he did. Except he does.

“Yes, my fool.”

Baze has pulled him so close that they are almost lip to lip when he says, “For me.”

Chirrut laughs, and it vibrates through both of them. “Yes. Baze, will you do me a favor?”

There is nothing that Baze would not do for this man in his arms who is lovely and infuriating in turns. Who is mercurial and inspiring and yet soft under all those blows that he can land and all those smiles he flashes. He could ask for anything. He could ask for everything. Baze would do it all. “Anything.”

“Don’t make me wait longer.” There is a plea in those words as though Chirrut thinks Baze is capable of doing anything other than agreeing.

He says the only words he can, the only words there are. “Yes, I’ll marry you. If you’ll have me.”

Baze supposes that the kiss that follows, the tongue in his mouth, the hands threaded into his hair, the way that he knows every inch of Chirrut’s body even through their clothes is answer enough.

And, he thinks, as Chirrut says his name over and over like a prayer, perhaps they are both Icarus convinced that they are hurtling through the sky, trying not to die, desperate to touch the sun.


	8. 35. I hate trying to put my desire into words when my body knows exactly what to say.  Come home. (You can’t start a fire without a spark.)

Baze Malbus is an imperfect man. He knows this well. He is quiet and solitary, preferring the edges of existence to being in the crush of the crowd. All of his favorite pastimes involve himself and his hands, working alone to create something or, more and more often, to destroy something, but that is the way of the universe these days and not entirely his fault. Baze has always tried to be an altruistic man, tried to put the needs of others before his own, though often from the sidelines and with no hint of recognition for it because deeds done for glory alone should not be done at all. In his mind, it is an act of being selfless even if others, especially those closest to him, have in irritated tones indicated that it is more like a martyrdom than anything else, that accepting a little pittance for a thing well done is not a blight on one’s character. These are words that Baze hears but lets slip over him like rain off his gear.

Even as a Guardian of the Whills, which he thought would always be his best calling, his faith has been put to the test and found wanting. More and more with every day and with every move the Empire makes, infringing on their life and their temple, his trust in the Force wanes, wavers, threatens to snap like the gossamer filament of the spider’s web when walked through. A thing can only be pulled so tight before it breaks and even Baze, who has been called patient and pliant and devoted, can only take so much before he cracks. It is another sign of being an imperfect man.

These things do not bother him. Much. In the light of day. By night when there is little else to think on, when the wind blows in through the windows and fills the halls and his ears with sighing, it’s hard not to linger on all the ways in which he is found wanting. Though it is always easier with Chirrut, warm, at his side. Chirrut with his smiles and his eye rolling and his endless stream of words. It is funny how a man who could get along very well without speaking falls in love with one who never seems to stop talking. Baze has always enjoyed listening and laughing. Chirrut is one of the few people who can get him to laugh and who always says things worth listening to even when they are nonsense. Baze would listen to Chirrut recite the alphabet. Baze would put his head in Chirrut’s lap and let him run his fingers through his hair while reciting every line from every Whills document in the archive even though he knows them all by heart. Baze would bend and break and melt if Chirrut asked him, hang the stars, destroy the sun, fill a dried up riverbed with his tears, which are numerous and gather in his heart and in the pit of his stomach, a sea that he dares not let loose even though Chirrut chides him that he will drown himself from the inside out at this rate. Baze Malbus is an imperfect man in love with a man who seems to have been created from kyber crystals, from the Force, but also from some hard, impenetrable, angry chunk of Jedha itself.

Baze Malbus is pliant and patient and devoted (and kind, too soft-hearted for his own good), but Chirrut Imwe is stubborn and angry and driven (and funny, gentle when necessary, fond of children and animals.)

They are both imperfect men, Baze supposes, as he wanders through the marketplace of NiJedha, a tall and intimidating figure always attempting to make itself smaller, less imposing, melt into the crowd and be left alone. Chirrut always remarks how much of a pity it is that a handsome man like Baze does not wish to be looked at, does not want to be seen, would rather sink into the ground and stones and be nothing more than the background of their moon itself. Baze always counters with the fact that he is only handsome to Chirrut, only wants to be seen by Chirrut, which makes the other man click his tongue, and shake his head, and sigh like Baze is possibly the biggest fool he has ever met. This is not true even by half. Of the two of them, Chirrut is the bigger fool, and the scars across his body that Baze touches in the night speak to the truth of this fact.

Baze Malbus is an imperfect man who is, day by day, failing his faith and his temple and his people and himself. All of the roles that he has carefully cultivated since he was young are being taken away, and he is molding himself into something new, a mercenary with a gun, a destroyer of the Empire instead of a protector of the Force. Baze has been called patient and pliant and devoted, and he does not necessarily think that he is losing those traits, just changing them to fit with the new way the universe is flowing. It is not easy, but he has never wanted easy.

A man who wanted easy would never have even gotten near Chirrut Imwe. A man who wanted easy would have fled the moment he discovered that he had fallen in love with the reckless, gorgeous, posturing fool, the glory of the temple of the Whills in his own eyes, the preferred foundling of the Force.

No, Baze has never wanted easy. He has only ever wanted Chirrut, which is why he is currently threading his way through the crowded streets of NiJedha instead of being at home, working on his blasters or the darning or baking. There are still a million things to do at the temple to keep it running, even if his faith is waning that does not mean he is any less devoted to his brother and sister Guardians, to the masters, to the younglings. They are the Whills, he is the Whills. Lack of faith in the Force does not mean he can stop being who and what he is to the people that he cares about. It just means that he sometimes feel empty inside, scooped clean like a melon without its seeds.

Chirrut is seated on the steps of a shop whose owners they are friendly with, his plate for collections on his knee, and he is smiling, gesturing, head canted off to one side, playing up the part of the blind man who cannot see but knows all. He is a good actor, his love, and he has always had the gift of getting the crowd to eat right out of his hand. No, this is inaccurate. He has always had the gift of getting anyone to eat right out of his hand, which is probably how he lured Baze in at the start, bit by bit, little by little, silver words and a smile to match, quick-witted, quicker footed, deadly and sharp. Baze has always liked a bit of danger, a little flash. Things that he lacks, he admires in others, and he admires everything about Chirrut.

He could cross the distance in seconds if he lengthened his stride, if he did not care about being seen, about pushing past people, but he does so it takes longer. It takes even that much longer because, even though they have been friends for nearly all their lives, even though they have been lovers since before the Empire, Baze is still sometimes shy about approaching Chirrut after they have had a fight. Baze is the one with the guns. Baze is the one who looks like he could wreak havoc through the marketplace and never bat an eye, but Chirrut is the deadlier of the two of them, made more so by the fact that one could never guess by looking at him.

By the time he has reached Chirrut’s side and leaning heavily against a pillar, the mass of people, pilgrims, and interested onlookers, has faded, potentially because of how he looks, a bear of a man covered in gear with messy, unkempt hair and a massive scar across his cheek. He knows how he looks. When even the orphans trained to rob people blind run from you, you have managed to become a monster. A farce, the largest of them all, Chirrut sometimes proclaims after the orphans who have avoided Baze flock to him and he picks them clean of all their winnings, chiding them not to judge people by appearance before handing everything back. At which point, Baze empties his own pockets to give them more, always more, always everything, never holding anything back, which makes Chirrut sigh and shake his head and click his tongue and tap his staff against the ground angrily.

This is one of the many things that they fight about, Baze’s willingness to strip himself bare for the sake of others, Baze’s continual attempts at martyrdom.

“Greetings traveler,” Chirrut says, and Baze knows that Chirrut knows that it is him and also that Chirrut knows Baze knows. They are imperfect and complicated men, but they have known each other too long now to not have figured out all the dusty corners and tucked away corridors of the other. Like Baze knows how to curl his fingers against the nape of Chirrut’s neck to make him sigh contentedly into every kiss.

“You’re still mad at me?” Baze does not mince words, not here, not in public. He knows words. He knows them all. He knows more languages and more words and more texts than Chirrut, and they have all been recited in the night when they are alone. Baze knows poetry that would make the stars weep. No one would ever guess that to look at him.

Chirrut’s mouth is a line as hard as any mountain on Jedha. “Yes.”

Baze blows his breath out through his nose audibly and shuffles closer. Chirrut turns his head, and leans away, an obvious indication that Baze is supposed to chase him further, ever further. Baze would follow him to the ends of Jedha, to the ends of the universe. Once he pledged to follow him into the Force, but he does not know if he would be welcome there any longer considering how his heart hurts with every thought he has about the power, whether it’s there, whether it cares.

It ought to care. He cares. That is another thing they fight about. How much Baze cares. How he doesn’t know how to turn it off when necessary the way that Chirrut can. Chirrut always excelled at mastery of the body, mastery of the will. Baze. Baze did not. He is a fountain, broken, unable to be turned off.

Chirrut moves away, Baze follows until he is kneeling on the stairs, his lips practically wrapped around the lobe of Chirrut’s ear, which is something the other likes that makes him twitch and groan, something Baze will hopefully do later, in private, to help apologize, to speak to him. “Come home.”

“Why?” Chirrut’s voice is pitched for only him but that is the only move toward concession he has made.

When Baze speaks, he uses a dialect of Jedhan that is uncommon, that is archaic and ancient as the statues in the sands outside the city. It is a language that he taught himself, pushed himself through night after night until he had perfected it, it is the language that Chirrut, foundling, changeling child of the desert, spoke when he first came to the temple. It is a thing, among many things, that they share, and it is always how Baze apologizes. “Heart of my heart, I cannot light a fire without a spark.” He presses a kiss to Chirrut’s neck because, sometimes, his words mean very little even though he has so few of them much of the time, but his gestures, there his heart has always been laid bare, open, and Chirrut knows that language better than anyone, better even than Baze himself.

“Perhaps I can help you attend to that,” Chirrut says, getting up quickly enough that the motion knocks Baze off balance and onto his backside on the stairs. Without a word, Chirrut offers a hand to help him up and does not release it even when he has found his feet again.

Hand in hand, they pick a path through the streets back home. Hand in hand, through the rush and the hustle and the bustle of the crowd, right through the center of it, where everyone with eyes to see can look at Baze even though all Baze can see, all Baze can ever see is Chirrut.


	9. 23. We talk in the dark as we fall asleep, and we are objects in the night sky outside of time. (it is the exact opposite of alone.)

There are innumerable paths to becoming a Guardian of the Whills. At least that is what the masters say. There are more ways to serve the Whills, to prove your worth than there are stars in the sky, than there are kyber crystals in the caverns under their feet. All is as the Force wills it, after all, so the ultimate test must come from the Force itself.

This is the kind of talk that confuses Baze, leaves him feeling at a loss for what to do next because he has always thrived on instruction, on the sure knowledge of having a set purpose, a plan. The idea that, ultimately, the end goal is somewhat up in the air, privy to his own interpretations, not laid out in perfect detail is disconcerting. It makes his stomach clench into tight knots and keeps him up long into the night, looking at the darkness spread across the ceiling thick as jam on bread trying to figure out what his next steps should be, what the Force is trying to tell him. As he has gotten older, the Force, which was once clear and easy to hear, has gotten hazier, further away, as though it is whispering, as though he has forgotten how to listen.

Again and again, his mind goes back to Chirrut. Again and again, his mind wanders off course, following the will of his heart instead of the will of the Force. Chirrut, after all, cannot be what the Force is trying to point him towards. That way is not quite blasphemy, not in the way that it is to the Jedi, but it is certainly not supposed to be his end task. The Force would not direct him to find his Guardian role in the heart of another. It goes against everything he knows about it. Everything he thinks he knows. The Force sometimes moves in mysterious ways, but this still feels like his own wants bleeding through more than anything else.

Somehow, though, they have gotten tangled up together, the Force and Chirrut, bound as if by silken ropes, by shards of kyber, they shimmer in the same way in his mind’s eyes, in his soul. It perplexes him and makes him doubt himself, doubts the path that he is on and whether he is worthy of it. There are other roads to walk in life, he knows, and perhaps he would be better at one of those. There are so many roads, but Baze has never considered any of them other than being a Guardian of the Whills.

No, this is not quite true. He has considered other things but only insofar as they would still benefit the Whills in other ways, in smaller ways perhaps but even small ways are important. A gardener, a baker, a sculptor, an archivist. All of these have flitted into and out of his mind before over the years because he loves them all. Being a Guardian did not mean that he could not be all of those things as well. Guardians serve in whatever way they can, he knows. But all of those roles, on their own, would mean not being a Guardian, which seems somehow lesser in his mind, even though he knows that it shouldn’t. The masters have always said that no one’s place in the Force is greater than anyone else’s, no matter what the Jedi say about prophecy.

“They need something to hold onto,” one of the masters told him when he was young and confused over the texts of their cousins. “They need to split things into pieces to understand it because at the heart of themselves they are conflicted. They have not yet come to see that everything is a whole. There is not light and darkness, separate and distinct, there is just the Force. Everywhere. Since they see it this way, they needed to contrive a story in which someone could bring it together. It’s a metaphor for their own disjointedness. They need someone to bring it together for them because they cannot just accept that it is. Like we know.”

And Baze, young and wide-eyed because how could the Jedi be wrong about something when they had lightsabers and powers and Force ability? How could it be that they were wrong? “Why can’t we just tell them, Master.”

“We have tried, Initiate Malbus, and they cannot hear us. They do not heed the Whills. It is their way. We are together in the Force, the way that we are together in the Force with all life, but we are still separate. Do you understand?” They had touched his hair, short cropped like all the younglings, and Baze had just stood there for a moment, thinking.

“Like the branches on a tree?” he asked. “Starting from the same place but not going to the same place?”

The fingers patted his cheek, and the master smiled. “Very much like a tree, young Baze. Think of the Force as a tree and everything in the universe part of that tree, branches and leaves and roots. Everything connected and of the same stuff but not always the same thing. For each leaf is different, isn’t it?”

Baze, who spent so much of his time in the gardens with the plants, in the trees, tending all the living things because he liked them, he liked to help, and he liked how quiet they were. They did not yell and scream into the Force the way that other beings did. No, the plants were quiet. They giggled and sang and whispered. Sometimes he couldn’t even hear them properly, they were just a quiet sound lapping against the edges of his mind, endlessly comforting. When the trees dropped their leaves, he had studied them, ran his fingers over the tracery of their veins, compared to his own where he could make out the rivers of his blood that traveled under his skin. All the veins were different even if the shape of the leaves were the same. Everything in the universe was special. Everything in the universe was sacred. “Yes, Master,” he said with a smile, thinking of the leaves and flower petals and everything unfolding around him.

“Good boy,” the master said, grinning, using another one of their many arms to settle a hand on his shoulder. “Baze, why are you here?”

“To be a Guardian. To serve the Whills. To serve the Force,” he answered, voice strong and clear and wholly innocent, repeating the same words that he had given the day he had knocked on the temple door, alone, sent by his family because there were simply too many mouths, and of all the children Baze was the one marked, Baze was the one who heard, who saw, who spoke of lights in the sky and voices in his mind, the one who would flicker out of existence when the calling was too much. They had told him he was special, but that had meant less to Baze than the fact that by going to the temple, he could help his family. Even if it meant he probably would not see them again.

They had told him that as well when they bundled him up in as many layers of his clothing as they could wind round him, tucking bits and pieces anywhere there was a chance, putting what little food they could into his pockets, kissing his face and his hair and his hands. There had been a lot of crying, and he could not recall their faces, but he did remember the warmth of their tears on his skin, bright like sunlight, but full of salt. He said he loved them. He asked them not to cry. They said they would not see him again. The sands were calling. Baze never found out what that meant. No one would tell him at the temple when he arrived. No one ever has, though Chirrut’s face changes in a way that scares him when he asks so he stopped ages ago, thinks instead of the sands of Jedha, of everything that is there, of the caves and the statues. Surely there are other cities. Surely there are other places to live. In one of those, his family exists, whole and happy and safe. So it is fine if he does not see them because he remembers the feel of lips on his palms, tears on his fingertips.

When the master smiled, it was sad, the sort of face they gave him from time to time, a sort of grown-up expression that Baze had not learned how to read yet but that was a bluish-gray in the Force glimmers that would dance through his head. “No, young one. Why are you in the archives instead of playing? Why are you reading during the free period? Would you not rather join your classmates?”

Baze had frowned, his face moving before he meant it to, but the master said nothing, just tilted their head slightly to the side, and waited. The other kids didn’t like him much, and Baze could not understand why, had never asked. They were not cruel, but they were separate. When he got near, they would part in waves around him, and none of them ever spoke to him first or sought him out. He never felt at peace with them. Plus they were loud. In every definition of the word he knew. The archives were better, the kitchens were better, the long spiraling hallways filled with ancient artwork, the corridors where he could wander and wander until he was lost and then follow his steps back to the initiate dorms were better, and the garden was best. Though the garden was currently full of the other children who did not get him, which was why he was there. “I like the archives.” It was not a lie; it was just not the entire truth. “It’s quiet here. I like the quiet.”

The master folded their many hands together and looked at him for a moment, so long that Baze grew uncomfortable and shifted his weight from one foot to the other as he waited. “You don’t always have to listen so hard. I think it would be wise for you to remember that. However, if you like the archives, let me find a book for you.”

Instead of a book about the Whills or the Force or the history of Jedha, the master had located one full of poems and stories. Long, rambling things about trees and gods and children birthed from flowers and serpents who lived in the air. It had entranced Baze for hours, long past the point when he should have left the archives to attend his other classes, but the master must have covered for him because no one ever said anything to him, he never got in trouble for that long afternoon spent lying on his stomach reading as the words spun out like so many sparkling, glimmering roads, each one a truth in and of itself even when they did not coalesce. Baze took them all, tucked them into his head and his heart, never forgot them, would whisper them, delightedly, to Chirrut when he discovered that he was not afraid of him, did not scurry at the mere sight of him, was loud but in a different way, in a way that would soar through his body like a bird in flight instead of like the clamor of a bell in his brain.

He thinks about it, the ease of it, just being in the archives and reading the books there, letting the words take him away wherever they wanted to, as he stares at the ceiling, trying not to think about the paths and the roads to becoming a Guardian, the winding, circuitous routes of the Force. Sometimes trees grow wrong. Baze knows this because he has seen them, several in the temple garden. They grow right through something instead of around it, they fuse themselves with other saplings planted too close to them, forming a bond that can never be broken. Can be people be like trees in this? Can people also grow wrong?

Has he grown wrong? Is that why the voice of the Force, once so clear, has dulled. When it was once too loud such that he would get frightened and hide under the stairs even though it didn’t help, it didn’t help because the Force is everywhere and nowhere and inside everything, invisible but not so it didn’t matter where he went because there it would be, always, waiting. Only now he has to strain to hear it, thinks it pulls away from him, little by little, as though he has wronged it. Perhaps he has.

Baze does not quite love the Force like he used to, and he no longer fears it. But if he has grown wrong than how will he know that he is on the right path at all? If he has grown wrong, what if he ends up walking, alone, into the night, into the sands, into nothing, without a path, without a reason, never to come home?

And what is home? It is the Whills with its labyrinth corridors and crystal caverns and the endless amounts of knowledge? Or is it the bright unfurling in his chest when Chirrut’s fingers twine into his own? What if it is the latter and that means he has failed all the tests that the Force and the Whills have put before him?

In the dark, Baze covers his face with his hands as though he can stop his thoughts from meandering so far by physically holding them inside of his skull, and because there are tears on his face that he should wipe away even though the chances are slim that anyone will see. He is meant to be of sterner stuff, after all. He wants to be a Guardian, he wants to protect the temple and all the small, lovely things that are contained inside of it. The children and the flowers and the kyber and the lore. The bricks of the temple itself seem to be filled with more knowledge than he will ever be able to carry in his worried and ramshackle mind. He would die for it.

He would also die for Chirrut. He would do many more things for Chirrut. Baze cannot fathom anything he would not do for Chirrut, and that is another cold worry in the stack that he has been collecting, that gather on his chest like stones to sink him into chilling water, to steal his breath away. 

“You carry indecision like a millstone round your neck,” one of the masters told him, once, when he was past childhood but not quite a man, his shoulders filling out, his height extending in leaps and bounds that left him clumsy, all his limbs betraying him. “You rely on others to choose for you, and that is a dangerous way to live, Initiate Malbus. You must be very careful who you rely on if you let someone else take your will.”

It’s not quite that, he thinks, even though he can scarcely put into words what it is instead. Perhaps it is simply that he does not trust himself. It is hard to see where he should be, where he should stand, who needs him. Baze always attempts to place himself where the need is greatest, where he can try and do the most good, but he gets confused, torn in many directions, like how his heart has wanted to be a baker, a painter, a gardener, a mender, a guardian. There are all these things that need doing, and he wants to do them all, stretch himself so wide that he can easily complete all of them, stretch so wide that he can cover the entire temple the way that the night sky covers the moon of Jedha when the sun goes away. Even though he knows this is not how it works, he can not stop thinking of night the way he saw it in that book from so long ago, a painting of a person in a black cloak studded with bright stars, arms spread wide to embrace the entire world. He likes that image. He would be that if he could.

Baze Malbus would be the night sky, dark and tranquil, swimming with stars, arms spread wide for the universe itself, holding everything because some things never get held at all and that is the biggest tragedy that he can imagine, even larger than this pressing weight of indecision on his chest.

By the time the door to his door opens, he has folded his hands on his chest again, but he is still crying, silently and sparsely, just rivulets of salt water down his cheek, which fingers almost as familiar as his own find and wipe away. “You’re so loud, I can hear you thinking in my room.” Chirrut’s voice is a not even a good facsimile of a whisper as though he has no concept of the fact that it is late and they are all supposed to be asleep, that night is for quiet and darkling thoughts that rustle in the corners like small creatures seeking sustenance.

Baze would die for him, and he wonders if he knows this fact even as Chirrut shoves at his arm until Baze has rolled onto his side, pressed his back against the wall in order to make enough room on the small bed for Chirrut to join him. Now the blackness that he stares into is located inside of Chirrut’s eyes, and it is so much more alive than anything else he has ever seen. “Did you come to quiet me?” He doesn’t realize how much it sounds like a leading question, a request for a kiss or more, until it is out of his mouth, and he can see the white of Chirrut’s smile gleaming in the black around them. The darkness is a reprieve because Chirrut will not be able to see the blush that rises on his face, trails down his neck, seems to fill him with a rushing warmth all the way to his toes, like sliding into the kyber pools.

“Not in. Not in that way,” Baze protests before Chirrut can say anything, and his voice stumbles out of him in fits and starts like he is wine drunk after a festival and struggling to rise.

“No?” Chirrut’s voice is part mocking and part disappointed and all distracting. If Baze did not love him so, it would be irritating and frustrating, but all it is now is as intoxicating as a warm palm pressed to the small of his back after a sparring match, a promise of further intimacy to follow. The hand that Chirrut places on his cheek to brush away the remaining tears is careful, cautious, comforting, and Baze leans into it as soundly as he would against a tree or a pillar, something solid that will not move under his weight, something he trusts.

“No,” Baze agrees, mollified, but suddenly not nearly as humiliated by the slip of the tongue because he wouldn’t mind it if things did go that way, would accept it willingly and completely. He just needed Chirrut to know that it wasn’t a come on, wasn’t some flirty, strange thing. Baze has never been good at those anyway. Charm is Chirrut’s hallmark, fashioned for him as surely as the starbird round his neck, the one that is always warmed from his skin when Baze presses his lips to it, to his chest, to every piece of flesh on him.

“Maybe later,” Chirrut’s voice never whispers as though he has never learned how to be quiet, but it softens to the point where it is like flower petals rubbed between fingers. “I came to find out what was wrong anyway. Not just kiss it better. Unless you want me to.”

The weight of all his worries remain like anchors tied to his feet. Baze is unsure whether he will ever be able to step out of them and walk freely, isn’t sure he would know what to do with himself if he ever managed it. He has braided his anxieties into his hair along with bits of lace and the locks Chirrut gave him when he chose to have his own head shorn. Baze’s family kept their secrets in their hair. He remembers this out of so little, and he has followed suit.

“Baze.” The word like a flower petal ready to tear if too much pressure is used.

Baze reaches out to touch him only to find that Chirrut catches his hand before it reaches him, presses kisses to each of his knuckles in turn and then his palm. Once, when they had first started dipping their toes into the water of their attraction to each other, Chirrut ran his lips and tongue across the line on Baze’s hand meant to represent life and then along the one supposed to be for love. He had nipped and sucked, Baze breathing heavily and aching and so enamored, wanting to do something but frozen, until Chirrut had looked up, eyelids heavy and guarded, lips full, and said, “Now I’m connected to both. Now I’m part of both. For you.” And Baze couldn’t make his tongue move to tell him that he didn’t think it worked that way, because he wanted it to be true, though he was able to make his tongue move enough to press it greedily into Chirrut’s mouth when they kissed.

“I will hear you,” Chirrut says, and his words are a winding path of their own. There are many paths in the Force, and most of them have been trodden by many feet in the past, generations of members of the Whills. Then there is Chirrut, blazing down his own path, making his own way.

And then there is Baze who does not know what to do and where to go and how best to serve. There is Baze who thinks of the future and only sees Guardian robes in a puddle at Chirrut’s feet, sees the light of kyber reflecting cool off his golden skin, sees his own hands splayed across that perfection, sees them hand in hand, sees one set of footsteps in the sand that he places his own feet into because he knows no other way than to follow where this man goes. If that is wrong, if that is him grown wrong, he is not sure he would want to be right.

Baze swallows. Baze speaks. “I do not know a path in the Force other than you.”

There is nothing sinister in Chirrut’s laugh, nothing ominous in his smile, which is the way it can look when facing an opponent. There is not even mirth but something much more pure, awestruck, nearly rapture. “I kissed myself there,” he says, still so soft, like sinking fingers into flour. “I kissed myself onto your lifeline. Now you cannot be rid of me.”

It is truth. This is truth. Maybe this is not how it works, but that does not mean it is not the truth even if it discomforts him somewhat. The truth and Baze are fast friends, he has always sought it like a plant following the course of the sun throughout the day. He has always embraced it and always will, especially when it is warm and solid and laughing against his skin.

Baze cannot be the night sky. He cannot spread his arms wide and embrace the whole of the universe. His arms will not spread wide enough to embrace even the whole of Jedha. But his arms are wide enough to fit Chirrut in the circle of them. They are strong enough to hold him even when he feigns attempts to break free that only roll them over until Chirrut is astride his lap and leaning down to pepper his face with kisses, hungry lips and tongue and heart. Chirrut has the hungriest heart that Baze has ever met, and he would be consumed entirely.

The night is dark, and the temple is quiet. There is no sound, no light. It is like hanging in the sky between the stars, but they are not alone when they are together. And Baze is fine having no path other than the one his tongue traces from the juncture of Chirrut’s hip further down.


	10. 40. I laugh along but inside I know that it’s true: Being in love is totally punk rock. (quiet kisses are so hardcore)

They have a tradition for Valentine’s Day:

They both take the day off and spend at least two extra hours in bed, waking languidly and at their own pace, which mostly means that Chirrut wakes as early as normal but lets Baze sleep and Baze, who often sleeps so little, gets a bit of a lie in while Chirrut traces his fingers over his husband’s features and just enjoys the peace and warmth of him in their bed together. Eventually, Baze will stir, and they will cuddle and kiss and whisper hundreds of sappy, flowery things because Chirrut married a romantic, after all, and still has not been able to cure him of the habit. (And he wouldn’t want to, no matter how much he sometimes rolls his eyes and clicks his tongue and chides Baze when he starts fretting about the fact that the table isn’t set right because it’s not like Chirrut can see it. Baze could simply tell him that it’s fine, and he would believe him. But this is Baze, and Baze steadfastly does not lie. He just fusses and worries and waxes poetic all day long.)

Once they manage to pry themselves out of the warmth of their bed and each other, they settle into the kitchen where Chirrut prattles and makes the tea while Baze fixes whatever insanely complicated but delicious thing he has planned for breakfast. From brioche to French Toast to strange muffins to bagels to beignets, Chirrut has tasted everything his husband bakes, and it is all good, to varying degrees. He likes some things more than others. And some dishes require a more strenuous exercise routine in order to keep them from sticking to places that Chirrut does not want. Baze fusses about that, too, about how slim and toned and perfect Chirrut remains while he has a layer of fat stretched over his own muscles that will not shift or move and seems to get worse with each passing year. Chirrut only runs his hands across the expanse of Baze’s chest and thighs and ass (especially his ass, Chirrut is fine with every single bite of brioche going right there) and tells him, over and over, how much he loves it, how attractive it makes him until Baze is flustered in an entirely different way that typically ends with one of them giving the other a blowjob in the middle of the kitchen behind the island but still in front of the full-length glass windows, though they face the sea so Baze only needs to worry about nosy mermaids and birds spying on them. Chirrut has no such qualms and would happily blow his husband in front of windows facing their neighbors if Baze would concede to it. But he won’t. Not even on Chirrut’s birthday. He’s asked.

After breakfast, they shower together, fingers running through the water and over bodies that have changed with time but so gradually that they know each other as well now as they ever have. And Chirrut washes Baze’s hair, which makes him moan and sigh in the way that always leads to more kissing and lingering touches and then if Baze’s knees are cooperating, sex in the shower. This has gotten progressively less common as they age and, admittedly, a little harder, but still good. Just as everything they have together is good.

Sometimes, when Baze’s knees are not cooperating, like today, they tumble out of the shower in a flurry of wet skin and barely thoroughly conditioned hair to take the petting and lovemaking to the bed where Baze is as gentle as always, and Chirrut is all smiles and slow, tantalizing thrusts until he can get Baze wound up enough to be as vocal as he wants him. Baze has a voice that echoes through his body like an earthquake, and Chirrut loves to hear the house filled up with his shouts of pleasure when he hits just the right spot. Nothing makes him harder, nothing makes him come quicker than hearing how much Baze enjoys it when they are intertwined.

Sprawled on the bed, which is wet now so the sheets will need to be changed and then Baze will fuss and swap out the duvet as well and probably open the curtains to let the light in and make sure the mattress dries thoroughly, Chirrut catches his husband’s hand and places a kiss on the inside of his wrist, right over where he can feel his pulse, the strong, firm reminder of that heart that beats, each lubdub of it another moment they have together. The best way to keep Baze from fretting over something is to keep him occupied. So Chirrut kisses and laps and runs his teeth over the inside of Baze’s wrist until he thinks that he could come again from the sighs and moans Baze makes alone, the way his husband runs a hand through his short hair, curls his fingers around his neck, insistent but never a threat. Baze has enough strength to crack cups in two in his hands but is the gentlest soul that Chirrut has ever known. He’s heard Baze cry over flowers that will not grow no matter how tenderly he takes care of them. He’s known Baze to weep about how beautiful he thinks Chirrut is when the sun hits him just right. He’s held his hand while he came undone when his mother died even though she refused to speak to him after they married, a blow that Baze has still never quite healed from.

His love gives people pause on the street, but cups insects in his great palms to ferry them outside rather than squash them. It’s Chirrut people should be wary of and then they never are. Fools, the lot of them.

“Love,” he murmurs, lifting his mouth from Baze’s wrist, and tilting his head in the general direction of where he knows he is based on the sound of his breathing and where he can feel his warmth.

Baze hums in response and the hand on Chirrut’s neck tightens just a little, enough to make him close his eyes and sigh.

“Do you remember our first Valentine’s Day together?”

This time Baze laughs and Chirrut could sprawl out in that warm sound and sleep, like a cat in the sunshine. “That punk rock show, yes?”

“Yes.”

“I hated that. It was too loud and there were too many people. And I couldn’t talk to you.”

“You hate talking.”

Baze does not rise to the bait, and Chirrut is teasing anyway. Baze does not like talking, but Baze likes talking to him. Baze will talk for hours, and Chirrut likes nothing more than to settle his head on his chest and listen to him and feel him talk. The more animated about something Baze gets, the better it is because it changes the vibrations of his voice, makes something flow inside of his chest like a lantern. When Baze talks about him, his endless flowery poetry voice, he always glows.

“I couldn’t hear you. I love listening to you,” Baze says instead of protesting.

Chirrut laughs, and he can feel Baze turn more toward him, his other hand coming to rest on his hip, thumb tracing idle circles against the skin. “We remember it differently. I loved it.”

Baze hums again and the thumb presses into his skin slightly, a signal for Chirrut to continue talking.

“It was our fourth date, I think. And it was strange because I loved you. I had loved you for so long, but it was. I knew your mother wouldn’t approve so I was always hesitant about it, about loving you, about wanting you and letting you know because I was not going to be that for you, I was not going to make you choose.”

Baze’s silence has changed, grown more somber, and Chirrut presses another kiss to his wrist to try and staunch the sadness before it grows. That is something he has to watch with Baze, the man is as full of emotions as the sea is flush with water, adding more just causes problems, people drown.

“There, there, my love. There, there,” he croons, and Baze’s thumb goes back to tracing idly over his skin.

“So I thought I would ask you to accompany me to a place that would make you the most uncomfortable because that would give you a good reason to let me go if you wanted to if you needed to. I know you. You hate to disappoint, but you hate even more to be uncomfortable.” Chirrut stops, smiles, and he knows that Baze is watching him. There is a weighty quality to Baze’s stares. It is like being surveyed by an otherworldly creature; an otherworldly creature that adores you.

“But you said yes. I didn’t think you would. You came. And when the moshing started, you stood behind me, and you wrapped your arms around my shoulders to hold me steady, to make sure that I was alright.”

Baze presses a kiss to his shoulder, a silent urging on.

“I considered decking you for that because I was capable of taking care of myself, and I was used to the punk shows. And then I thought, ah me, this man wants to take care of me. This man is willing to be uncomfortable for me because I enjoy this thing.” Chirrut reaches up to find Baze’s face, fingers tracing over his lips and into his hair. “And that was when I knew that not only did I love you but that I was not going to love anyone else other than you.”

Baze’s voice sounds thick and strained when he speaks, and Chirrut does not need to touch his cheeks to know that he is crying. “Do you remember after the show?”

“Yes,” Chirrut leans forward to kiss him. “I remember. All your soft kisses. So quiet. So shy. Peppered across my skin like you thought I was fragile when I finally managed to seduce you enough to undress me.”

“I was scared that I would do it wrong. Or that you wouldn’t like it.”

“No, no. Never.”

“Do you remember what you said to calm me?”

Chirrut laughs again, slides closer, one leg slipping between Baze’s to apply firm but gentle pressure to his already hardening length. Maybe they will not get around to the rest of the tradition today, after all. Chirrut would not mind. “I do,” he whispers into Baze’s ear before his teeth tug gently at the lobe and Baze’s hands slide around his waist. “I told you not to worry. That you were hardcore. That we were punk rock. You were so startled I thought you were going to shake apart.”

Baze’s finger skates across Chirrut’s lip and then lower, spreading out over his chest. “It was your fishnets that shook me. Not being called punk rock. I was in a cardigan. I was the least punk rock thing about that night.”

“No, dear, our being in love in and of itself is punk rock.” Before Baze can protest, Chirrut slots their lips together, loses his tongue in Baze’s mouth, lets all their sense rush out in the tangling of limbs, the new crescendo of sighs and gasps and moans, the slow building to cries of pleasure loud enough to make him grin the smile that Baze always calls shark-faced.

Afterwards, instead of getting dressed up for a fancy dinner, they order pizza and spend the rest of the night in bed, trading quiet kisses. It is still just as punk rock as it was all those years ago even without the addition of a mosh pit or loud music or fishnets.


End file.
